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Julie188 writes with this quote from a Networkworld article:
"Two law professors from UC Berkeley have come up with a novel idea to protect open source developers from patent bullies. They call it the Defensive Patent License. They hope the DPL can address the objections FOSS developers have with patents the way the GPL addressed them for copyright. The DPL is similar to the concept of a defensive patent pool, but is not the same. The DPL is a bit more radical. It requires a bigger commitment from its members than the typical toe-in-the-water kind of pool, says Jason Schultz, former staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 'The perception is that bigger companies only commit their least-effective, least-important patents to a patent pool,' he says. Schultz isn't pointing fingers at any particular pool. However critics of IBM's open source patent pledge often said it didn't cover the patents most relevant to the FOSS community."

But why should a patent be necessary for that? Open Source software, by definition, puts the invention on public record - in considerably more detail and without the obfuscation present in patent claims. Patents are supposed to be for the benefit of 'practitioners in the art', but are in practice written by lawyers in a language foreign to the engineers and inventors. The publishing of the source should satisfy the requirements of 'prior art' so would block anyone from subsequently patenting it. So publishing as open source should provide all of the benefits of a patent without the expense and legal rigmarole of obtaining one.